Ever since the
sesquicentennial of Thoreau's masterwork in '04, a wave of “anniversary” Waldens
and a tide of Thoreau studies has surged. The
Thoreau Project recommends:

BY H. D.
THOREAU:

Excursions (two
editions)

Thoreau, we know, was partial
to the “excursion,” the voyage out and back – not only as a mode of exploring
the world but also as a form of essay writing.

Excursions
is the title of a collection of essays on travel and nature, edited after the
author’s death by his sister Sophia Thoreau with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and first
published in 1863. It was popular with readers at the time and is a classic
today, culminating with Thoreau’s masterly essays on sauntering and seeing:
“Walking” and “Autumnal Tints.”

It so happens that two
editions, scholarly and popular, of Excursions came out in 2007:

Excursions.The latest volume in Princeton U. Press’s ongoing Thoreau
Edition, edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Read
about it
here.
But first, bookmark this page so you can return here.

and

Excursions.
The latest volume in the Travel Classics series from
Anthem Press – no notes, but a foreword by Jeffrey S. Cramer of the Thoreau
Institute. Read about it here. But first, bookmark this page so you can return here.

More by
Thoreau

Walden: A Fully
Annotated Edition. Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer.
Yale UP, 2004. (Paperback without the notes, 2006) "There is
nothing like this - within the covers of one book - in the world of Thoreau
scholarship. The book is fascinating ... accurate and minute in its
scholarship... a Thoreau encyclopedia in one volume!"-Joel PorteSpecial essay on this website.

Walden: One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Foreword by
Terry Tempest Williams. Illustrated by Michael McCurdy. Shambhala, 2004, 320pp.
ISBN: 159030088."Shambhala's hardcover
edition is bejeweled by forty-nine striking woodcuts by Michael McCurdy, visual
aids to contemplation. Terry Tempest Williams's foreword... hones in on the
double metaphor of emancipation in Thoreau's writing: It 'was not only to be
extended to the freedom of slaves, but to the freedom of one's own soul. '"- Richard Higgins, UUWorld, Jul-Aug 2004

Henry D. Thoreau: Letters to a Spiritual Seeker.
Edited by Bradley P. Dean. Norton, 2004, 266 pp, ISBN: 0393059413.
Around 1848, Harrison Blake, the seeker of the title, asked Thoreau for guidance
in finding a path of his own after leaving the ministry. The result was a
regular exchange of letters for the remaining thirteen years of Thoreau's life.
Now all fifty letters are collected in a single volume, edited and annotated by
Thoreau scholar Bradley P. Dean."I
open this book at random and find daily strength in Thoreau’s words that gives
me courage in times of terror. His letters are wonderfully human, honest, full
of questions, revelations, and struggle. It is not the polished Henry we have
come to know and expect, but the social Henry, the communal Thoreau."
- Terry Tempest Williams, author of Leap and The Open Spaceof Democracy

François Specq, Transcendence: Seers and Seekers in the Age of Thoreau. Casts new light upon the
Transcendentalist writers who challenged traditional forms of thought and
expression. In a time of deepening social divisions, they appealed to the idea
of transcendence and “higher law,” opening historic paths to a more inclusive
democracy and a spiritual rebirth of the individual. Order it now!

Paul Friedrich, The Gita within "Walden" (2009). A fascinating
exploration of the interconnections between Walden and the Bhagavad-Gita.
The author is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Elise Lemire,
Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord (2009). "An
elegantly researched, deeply insightful, and eminently readable history of the
embattled black families in New England's most celebrated town from the
Revolutionary era to the heyday of the Transcendentalists." -Lawrence Buell

Sandra H. Petrulionis, To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement
in Thoreau's Concord (2006). "The finest and most detailed account of
the essential role played by women in the grassroots effort to promote the cause
of antislavery ...describes the activities of the women in the Thoreau and
Emerson households, who eventually persuaded Thoreau and Emerson to lend their
powerful voices to the controversial cause." -Len Gougeon, U. of Scranton/

Shoji Goto,
The Philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau: Orientals Meet Occidentals
(2007). Foreword by Phyllis Cole. Takes issue with the Western-centric
orientation of most studies of Emerson and Thoreau. Argues persuasively that
transcendentalism may be re-imagined as an original American philosophy forged
from non-Western elements. Emerson journeyed outside traditional Western
thought-forms in search of a unifying foundation for a wholly new belief system;
many authoritative editions of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" omit one sentence
pointing to the influence of Confucian political theory. Reviewed on this web site.

(Illustration
in the book below: Game Board, about 1860, by Sophia E. Thoreau [Henry's
sister], pasteboard, paper, & fern specimens)

Michael Sperber, M.D. Henry David Thoreau: Cycles and Psyche. Higganum Hill Books (Conn.),
2004.
"Elegantly
written and filled with surprising insights... adds a new chapter to our
understanding of Thoreau." -Alan A. Stone, M.D., Professor of Law and
Psychiatry, Harvard University

Alan D, Hodder. Thoreau's
Ecstatic Witness. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. 346pp. Reviewed
on this web site."What if Thoreau's
transcendent vision were so vital and pervasive that it could be detected nearly
everywhere – in virtually any of Thoreau’s works, informing both content and
style? That is the premise of this lucid study."
- Randall Conrad, Thoreau Society Bulletin 241

Ian
Marshall. Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and
Need (Under the Sign of Nature). UP of Virginia, 2003, 267 pp. ISBN:
0813921678."Ian
Marshall... is another modern pilgrim... a funny English professor, avid hiker,
Thoreau freak, and, despite being a practitioner of literary ecocriticism, an
extremely fine writer. Marshall thinks about metaphorical mountains while
climbing real ones, including the peak that Thoreau, in a letter to Blake, said
he keeps anchored in his mind and which he 'ascends
in my dreams, both awake and asleep.'"
- Richard Higgins, UUWorld, Jul-Aug 2004